Ryan Pitylak

Google Friendfeed API

Google Friendfeed API launched today, 3/12/2009.  There are open-source plugins available for Drupal, Wordpress, and phpBB.

Moving Your Site

When moving ips
1. DNS TTL: Set down to 5 Mins
2. Bring up site to exist on both IPs
3. Point old IP to point to new IP address
4. Wait 5+ minutes and take down old IP address

When moving URLs
- 301 Redirect a subdomain.
- Move a subdirectory first.  Not the entire site.   Check it out a week later and see if the move happened appropriately and you didn’t lose search traffic.
- Good to have a 301 redirect from each old page to the new page on the new site.  Don’t just redirect to the root

What is the best way to get your back links back when you move your site?
- If you are getting a back link from an important location, make sure you ask them to move the links over directly to your new site.

What Determines Rankings

Do clickthroughs help determine rankings?
- Click-through is not used when determining the search results
- Toolbars tracking clicks are also noisy indicators for value

Links & Pagerank are still major indicators for success
- Big opportunity to create services for APIs, Twitter, etc, that will help you get good links.  White-hat link bait.

What would do to optimize site

- Site architecture: Think of DMOZ: 13 top level categories, each one goes down, etc.  A linking strategy that bounces around throughout the site is bad.  Good keywords in URL.
- Titles: Good keywords in title.  Use Google Adwords Keyword Tool to insert some keywords into your title.
- URL and Title can have different keywords in them – this allows you to get 2 different keyword sets for ranking.
- Check server logs – what terms are you ranking for?  If you add more articles about the same topic, cross link them, might move from page 2 to page 1 for the keyword.
- Try to add 1 page of content a day (article/etc).

Additional comments
- Does Google have a Fast Index
o Yes, from update Fritz
o Go much faster than daily
- Do Twitter follower numbers increase PageRank?
o No
- More links causes Google to search deeper in your site
- Fresher content should be on top
- Posting a lot doesn’t help you to show up higher, but people do link to you more when you post more frequently, which drives up the SEO content.
- Drupal is one of the best CMS systems on the web.
- DIV Hidden text: If you create a bizarre way to hide text, it would be black hat, but typically it’s ok.  Google loves killing sites that have blackhat seo hidden text that is obviously spammy.

It’s definitely real.  The question is how long does it take to get out of the sandbox and what does it take to beat it.  After a lot of reading, it’s clear that you can get out of the sandbox quickly, but it seems like it’s a pretty difficult task for a small website.  This may be why the larger sites seem to exit the sandbox quickly, but the smaller sites continue to have problems.

Here is an interesting read on the topic:

http://www.mikesquarter.com/escape-google-sandbox-146/

Interesting to say the least!

Search Engine Land wrote a great article about the top 10 SEO myths. I’ve provided my comments below each myth.

Myth 1: You should submit your URLs to search engines.

Comment: Your site should be found through links from other sites. Submitting them to search engines does nothing because your site will only gain popularity if other sites link to you.

Myth 2: You need a Google Sitemap.

Comment: A well designed site should have a good linking structure, and the search engine should properly follow the linking structure without problem. In this case, you would not need a sitemap.

Myth 3: You need to update your site frequently.

Comment: This has a lot to do with the type of site you have. However, most content is inherently static and doesn’t require that you update it too frequently.

Myth 4: PPC ads will help/hurt rankings.

Comment: I believe these have been purposefully made separate so that there is no confusion about how it impacts results. I would argue that Google should consider giving people better rankings if they’re willing to pay for keywords, but I sure 100 other people could argue why that’s against the social good. I just believe that the ability to pay for keywords is an indicator of a keyword’s success for the company, and therefore, should be an indicator that the site is relevant to the topic.

Myth 5: Your site will be banned if you ignore Google’s guidelines.

Comment: I’ve never personally known of anyone who this has happened to. However, I don’t hang out in the black hat SEO community, and I don’t know what happens there. My assumption is that people in that community bend the rules so much that they do get into trouble. However, unless your doing things that are just plain bad, you’ll be fine.

Myth 6: Your site will be banned if you buy links.

Comment: Ha ha. That’s all I have to say about that. Advertising is advertising. You can penalize a company for buying ads on another website.

Myth 7: H1 (or any header tags) must be used for high rankings.

Comment: I believe this has some value, but it must be part of a bigger content on-site picture.

Myth 8: Words in your meta keyword tag have to be used on the page.

Comment: I don’t believe your keyword tags have much to do with rankings.

Myth 9: SEO copy must be 250 words in length.

Comment: Why not 200? Why not 300? Who picked 250? That’s funny.

Myth 10: You need to optimize for the long tail.

Comment: Love the long tail. Stick those keywords in your description tags, but don’t really worry about them too much. Don’t stick them in your H tags, don’t put them in your alt tags, etc. You should work hard for the top keywords. Remember…Focus.

Ryan Pitylak is a search engine optimization guru.